Having fun with Zorin

No, Zorin is not my dog or my Russian girlfriend, it is a Linux Operating System. And a very nice OS that will not discombobulate a Windows user because the user interface is very much like Windows.

I am running Zorin (and Windows 8) from an external SSD attached via USB3 in a virtual partition under VMware Player. That allows me to run those systems on any PC in- and outside the house. If you are interested in that setup, consult my little tutorial on my Skydrive. With a PDF enabled browser (e.g. Chrome), you can read it on-line. Else you can download it (right click on it).

Little recording problems:

The sound level of the recording is low. Turn the speakers up.
I set the recording window to cover my Windows 7 taskbar, but it cut it off.
When I trigger my Rocket dock, it does not show.
Sound comes only from the mic, not from the virtual system

Zorin is nice for a windows user to get feet wet with Linux because out of the box the GUI is similar to windows. I change the GUI to Gnome. It gets a thumbs up in my book! Zorin & Windows 8 are on my lappie. Ubuntu 12.10, Sabayon 10 and Windows 8 are on my desktop.

It sure is nice. I have used Ubuntu with the Unity interface and Fedora with Gnome 3, but those are not really user friendly. You must want Linux really badly in order to deal with them. But Zorin is very intuitive.

If someone doesn't like Unity they can install Gnome, LXDE,or others and make it their default. I hated Unity when it first came out, but I decided to learn about it and now I have it tweaked to my liking. But again "that is why there are a variety of flavors of ice cream". I am not a believer of Linux is better than anything else, but one thing I like about it is the high degree of customization that is possible. One does not have to stick with the out of box configuration.

I've been using Pinguy 12.04 which takes stuff from Mint and based on Ubuntu using Gnome3 and it's the most beautiful and intuitive Linux I've seen yet. the only downside I've hit, common to all Linux I think, is the printer UI's and options are PRIMITIVE...the only way round it I've found so far is to dual boot with Windows. i really really want move to this. If I can find a way of having the printer UI that's in Windows I could have this as my sole OS.

we are all laymen & laywomen whs. I learned how to do that by creating another logical partition and installing there. If I trashed it no problem because I still had my regular installations. Trust me I rendered a few unusable before I got it right.

My issue with Zorin,running in VirtualBox (checking it to see if I would recommend it or install it for family/friends as Windows alternative) is that it takes me three clicks on the start button to get the menu to pop up, wonder if it's just me or if this is a known bug. I haven't gotten that far in checking it out yet. On one computer with low specs as an extra one in a computer lab I set up xubuntu and customized it to look like windows, even to using a windows start button and changing the desktop icon for Firefox to the IE icon. The users really only want or need to access Webmail, Facebook and general surfing, just didn't want to confuse the seniors at the center with a different UI.

I currently run Zorin Lite 6.1 on an older (2005) HP DV4000 laptop w/ Pentium M 730 (1.6 GHz) & a half gig ram. I also run Zorin (full version) on a 2.8GHz single-core Dell desktop. I've never experienced the start button issues you report, and (so far) have nothing but good things to report with my Zorin experience. Both of these are full installs (no VM, no dual-boot, etc.), so I would have to guess that your bug is somehow related to running in VM.

This is what caught my attention; " I am running Zorin (and Windows 8) from an external SSD attached via USB3 in a virtual partition under VMware Player. That allows me to run those systems on any PC in- and outside the house."

@CompWiz - that is really neat and I ran it on several different PCs without changing anything. You do need to have the VMware Player installed on those systems though. I carry the installation files on the same external disk together with the VMware Windows 8 and Zorin systems. Here is is little tutorial on how you do all that: http://www.sevenforums.com/tut.....drive.html

@edmenje - I don't have to click more than once on the Zorin start button. And my Zorin runs under the VMware Player.